Scientometrics (2023) 128:1711–1743

https://doi.org/10.1007/s11192-023-04640-6

A study of the correlation between publication delays

and measurement indicators of journal articles in the social
network environment—based on online data in PLOS

Jingda Ding1 · Dehui Du1

Received: 1 May 2022 / Accepted: 17 January 2023 / Published online: 30 January 2023
© Akadémiai Kiadó, Budapest, Hungary 2023

Abstract
The development of network technique and open access has made numerous research
results freely obtained online, thereby facilitating the growth of the emerging evaluation
methods of Altmetrics. However, it is unknown whether the time interval from reception
to publication has an impact on the evaluation indicators of articles in the social network
environment. We construct a range of time-series indexes that represent the features of the
evaluation indicators and then explore the correlation of acceptance delay, technical delay,
and overall delay with the relevant indicators of citations, usage, sharing and discussions,
and collections that are obtained from the open access journal platform PLOS. Moreover,
this research also explores the differences in the correlations of the delays for the literature
in six subject areas with the corresponding indicators and the discrepancies of the correla-
tions of delays and indexes in various metric quartiles. The results of the Mann–Whitney U
test reveal that the length of delays affects the performance of the literature on some indica-
tors. This study indicates that reducing the acceptance time and final publication time of
articles can improve the efficiency of knowledge diffusion through the formal academic
citation channel, but in the context of social networking communication, an appropriate
interval at a particular stage in the publishing process can enhance the heat of sharing,
discussion, and collection of articles to a small extent, hence boosting the influence and
attention received by the literature on the internet.

Keywords Publication delay · Acceptance delay · Technical delay · Measurement

indicators · Correlation analysis

Introduction

Research on the publication delays of journal papers provides a valuable contribution to the
scientific data disclosure of periodicals and a reference for editorial departments to arrange
their review and publication time appropriately. Due to the editorial process, peer review,

* Jingda Ding
djdhyn@126.com
1
School of Cultural Heritage and Information Management, Shanghai University, Shanghai, China

13
Vol.:(0123456789)
1712 Scientometrics (2023) 128:1711–1743

and issue scheduling, journal papers can experience lags of varying length from their ini-
tial submission to final publication, leading to differences in the time cost of knowledge
dissemination.
Publication delays can affect certain evaluation indicators of periodicals and their arti-
cles. For instance, a longer delay in the publication of journals in a scientific field corre-
sponds to a larger backward shift in the citation distribution curves and a greater decrease
in the impact factor of journals in this field (Yu et al., 2005). In addition, a clear yet weak
tendency is observed for an inverse relationship between the editorial time and the num-
ber of citations of articles from Nature, Science, and Cell (Shen et al., 2015). Papers with
shorter publication delays are more likely to become highly cited (Lin et al., 2016). With
the development of information and communication technology and open access platforms,
an increasing number of articles have become accessible online, improving the range and
efficiency of academic knowledge diffusion to a certain extent. Against this background,
there are several unanswered questions concerning the influence of delays during the pub-
lishing procedure. What is the time lag difference during the publication between online
accessible articles with different citation quantities? What are the correlations between
publication delays and measurement indicators in the social media environment? Does
the delay vary in different metric quartiles and disparate discipline categories? Could the
length of delays affect the performance of articles in terms of various indicators? Exploring
these questions would help us better understand the impact of time lags during the publish-
ing procedure on the metrics of articles in the social network context. The research objec-
tives of this paper are as follows:

• To check for differences in the publication delays of articles with different citation fre-
quencies and subject areas.
• To investigate the correlation between the publication delay and measurement indica-
tors of journal articles in the social network environment and the correlation discrepan-
cies in different metric quartiles and disciplines.
• To probe the effect of the length of delays during the publication procedure on various
literature indicators.

Literature review

The peer–review process constitutes a form of knowledge production (Rigby et al., 2018),
but the publication delay, which refers to the time between the dates of submission and
acceptance or publication of an article, can influence the frequency of citations, the aging
of the literature, and the impact factor of journals. For instance, a longer average publica-
tion delay corresponds to a larger average moving range of the aging curve of the scientific
literature; in this case, publication delays are one of the main factors contributing to long-
term aging literature (Egghe & Rousseau, 2000). A simulative investigation theoretically
revealed an approximate inverse linear relation between the average publication delay in
a field (or discipline) and the impact factor of journals (Yu et al., 2005). Moreover, the
faster the aging rate of the discipline literature is, the worse the influence of publication
delays on the impact factor, immediacy index, and cited half–life of journals in the same
discipline (Yu, et al., 2006a, 2006b). The editorial delay of academic papers published in
Nature, Science, and Physical Review Letters also has a strong negative correlation with
the possibility of being highly cited (Lin et al., 2016). One journal publication delay also

13
Scientometrics (2023) 128:1711–1743 1713

influences another journal’s impact factor (Shi et al., 2017). When the publication delay of
a journal increases, the impact factor of all journals in its inter–citation journal group will
decrease, and the ranking of the journals according to the impact factor may be changed
(Yu, et al., 2006a, 2006b). Additionally, Guo et al. (2021) proposed a publication delay
adjusted impact factor to reduce the negative effect of publication delays on the quality of
the impact factor determination.
Various elements affect the length of delays during the publication process. For instance,
the prestige factor of the research group and authors’ publishing experience can determine
the length of editorial delays (Amat, 2008; Yegros & Amat, 2009). Per unit increase in
impact factor, there is a 19.1% increase in acceptance delay and a 15.8% decrease in publi-
cation delay in orthopedic surgery (Charen et al., 2020). Moreover, the increasing pressure
to publish journal articles with high impact factor significantly influences the publication
time in ophthalmology journals (Skrzypczak et al., 2021). Interestingly, scientific publica-
tions by board members have shorter publication delays than those by non–board members
(Xu et al., 2021). Additionally, on average, the duration of review for Covid-19 research
papers was almost 1.7 to 2.1 times shorter than those for non-Covid-19 articles during and
after the coronavirus pandemic, which confirms a widespread fast academic response to
Covid-19 in the form of apparently universally supporting more rapid publishing for rel-
evant studies (Kousha & Thelwall, 2022).
Publication delays demonstrate some differences across disciplines. For instance, tech-
nical science and mathematics publications have longer delays than those in natural and
life science (Luwel & Moed, 1998). Björk and Solomon (2013) found that journal articles
show considerable variances in the time between their submission and acceptance, whereas
the variances in the time between the acceptance and publication of these articles can be
mostly ascribed to the differences in the characteristics of journals. They also found that
the shortest publication delays occur in science, technology, and medicine (STM) and the
longest in the social sciences, the arts, and humanities and business and Economics. Mean-
while, the editorial handling time of biomedical journals varies widely from a few months
to almost two years (Andersen et al., 2021).
Along with the growing demand for knowledge sharing, easy access, and its utilization,
plenty of database platforms have introduced the online publishing function while at the
same time giving rise to a boom in open access (OA) to journals and articles, so that any-
one interested in downloading and reading the work of researchers does not face any obsta-
cles. Although the term OA itself was coined around 2000, scientists have been experi-
menting open access journals since the early 1990s (Laakso & Björk, 2013). In 2001, the
Budapest Open Access Initiative (BOAI) conference gave the most widely used definition
of OA, the core of which is, in short, that OA is unrestricted online access to articles pub-
lished in academic periodicals. The concept of open access includes a range of components
such as readability, copyright, reuse, publishing online, and machine readability. Open
access could immensely accelerate the process of scientific discovery and encourage sci-
entific innovation. Further, the advantages of OA have been confirmed in various empiri-
cal research. Breaking the traditional subscription model of academic publishing, OA arti-
cles usually get more citations, receive more recognition and eventually produce a bigger
impact in academia (Koler–Povh et al., 2014; Piwowar et al, 2018; Sotudeh & Estakhr,
2018; Wang et al., 2015). Thus, an increasing number of researchers led to publishing in
OA to make their results more accessible, with the prospect of a higher and faster influ-
ence (Antelman, 2017; Kristin, 2004). Online issues are generally available ahead of their
respective print versions, with an average delay of nearly three months (Das & Das, 2006).
Therefore, authors can receive significant gains from posting their manuscripts informally

13
1714 Scientometrics (2023) 128:1711–1743

in some online repositories (Amat, 2008). In addition, the delays between online and print
publications may artificially raise the impact factor of a journal, and this inflation is par-
ticularly greater for those with longer publication delays (Tort et al., 2012).
The boom in open access brings an opportunity for Altmetrics to thrive. The flexibil-
ity and convenience of open access allow academic achievements to be freely circulated
across different communication platforms and groups, laying the groundwork for the rise
of new metrics that rely on diverse social media. Social media has built a valuable bridge
between scientists and society as a modern network interaction tool. Rainie et al. (2015)
conducted a survey among members of the American Association for the Advancement of
Science (AAAS), in which up to 71% of respondents indicated that their area of expertise
would attract some or sometimes considerable interest to the public. With the continuous
increase of scholarly communication on the Internet, the impact evaluation framework of
academic papers considering online social media and online academic tools needs to break
through the shackles of the old traditional system of assessing scholarly works to reflect the
broad and rapid impact of scholarship in this emerging ecosystem. In this context, J. Priem
put forward the concept of Altmetrics based on summarizing the previous research results
(Priem et al., 2010). As a new evaluation method based on social networks and scientific
communication activities, altmetrics provides comprehensive and timely feedback on the
influence of research works through tracking activities (collection, sharing, reposting, com-
menting, citing, etc.) of all forms of scientific achievements. Compared to traditional evalu-
ation methods, altmetrics not only enrichs the connotation of the impact of research results
but also expands the evaluation dimension of influence. Studies have shown a strong posi-
tive correlation between altmetrics indexes and article visits (Wang et al., 2016, 2017). It is
worth noting that although there is still a degree of uncertainty in the relationship between
altmetrics indexes and citing metrics, altmetrics can still capture the aspect of social influ-
ence that differ from the reviewer’s perspective (Bornmann, 2014). And the metrics of
social media are usually deemed to be positive indicators of public interest and attention in
scientific research (Haustein et al., 2015).
Previous studies have mainly explored the influence of publication delays on citations,
literature aging, and journal impact factors, the factor affecting the length of publication
time lags, whereas others have investigated the size of publication delays in different disci-
plines. However, few studies explore the effect of publication delays on the metrics of arti-
cles in an internet social context. Therefore, the impact of publication delays on traditional
metrics (citations) and social network metrics (usage, sharing, discussions, and collections)
warrants investigation.

Methodology

Using online metrics data from the open access journal platform PLOS, we attempt
to explore the correlation between publication delays and a series of indexes of articles
by conducting Spearman correlation analyses to understand the influence of publication
delays on the measurement indicators of journal articles in a social network environment.
Statistically significant differences are considered with a probability of error less than 1%
(** indicates p < 0.01), probability of error less than 5% (* indicates p < 0.05). Meanwhile,
we will discuss the differences in publication delays and the discrepancies in their correla-
tions with evaluation indicators across subject areas.

13
Scientometrics (2023) 128:1711–1743 1715

To involve all aspects of the publication process, we partition the publication delay of
articles into three types, namely, acceptance delay (time span from submission to accept-
ance), technical delay (time span from acceptance to publication), and overall delay (time
span from submission to publication).
Launched by the Public Library of Science in December 2006, PLOS is a highly influ-
ential open access journal platform in academia that covers dozens of subject areas, from
natural sciences to social sciences. PLOS supports full–text downloads of papers and, since
March 2009, offers comprehensive article-level metrics (ALM), whose classification is
shown in Table 1. Citations are the number of times a publication has been cited by other
publications, a relative metric created from multiple sources. The original citation data in
this article comes from Dimensions, an extensive world-class linked research information
dataset. The number of citations available in Dimensions differs from Google Scholar, Sco-
pus, and Web of Science. References contained in Dimensions are not directly comparable
to other databases; it also captures references and links to sources beyond classic publi-
cation–based citations. In Dimensions, citation relations between different references are
either harvested from existing databases like PubMed Central, Crossref, and Open Cita-
tion Data or extracted directly from the full–text record provided by the content publisher,
which is not only limited to journal publication references but also includes acknowledg-
ments and citations from books, conference proceedings, patents, grants, and clinical trials.
Therefore, we use the citation frequencies in Dimensions as the raw data of citations of the
sample literature. However, usage, sharing and discussions, and collections are cumula-
tive metrics reflecting social attention, which is the sum across different sources such as
Mendeley, CiteULike, Facebook, Twitter, Wikipedia, Reddit, etc. We applied online data
in PLOS, powered by Altmetric as the source dataset for usage, sharing and discussions,
and collections.
For the empirical sample, on the PLOS platform, we retrieved the articles published in
2015–2019 that come from Biology and life sciences, Chemistry, Engineering and technol-
ogy affiliated to the natural sciences, and Economics, Psychology, and Sociology belong-
ing to the social sciences, at the beginning of 2022. Then we ranked the articles in these 6
subject areas in descending order of citations and divided the articles in each field into 4
groups using quartiles to obtain the top 200 papers in each group by citations, resulting in
a total of 24,000 pieces that were online access for free. We got these sample papers’ titles,
keywords, and other bibliographic information, as well as their received time, accepted
time, and published time, with the help of a self–written code by Python. We also col-
lected data on the number of citations, usage, sharing and discussions, and collections of
the obtained literature (Appendix Fig. 7).
Based on the online metrics data provided by PLOS, we constructed time–series–based
indexes and explored the correlation between these indicators and acceptance delay, techni-
cal delay, and overall delay. To acquire the real–time metrics data, we also used Python to

Table 1  The classification of evaluation metrics of articles in PLOS

Classification Sources of evaluation metrics

Citations Publications, Patents, Policy documents, Clinical trials and grants

Usage HTML views, PDF downloads and XML downloads
Sharing and discussions Twitter, Facebook, Wikipedia, PLOS Comments, Reddit
Collections CiteULike, Mendeley

13
1716 Scientometrics (2023) 128:1711–1743

obtain citation frequencies in each year (Appendix Table 10), usage in each month (Appen-
dix Table 11), and sharing and discussions in each month (Appendix Table 12) of the sam-
ple literature from the publication year to 2021.

Construction of time–series indexes

Mk denotes the observed value of an indicator in the kth window period of an article after
publication. The indicators of citations are expressed in years, whereas those of usage,
sharing and discussions are expressed in months. We built our indexes based on time series
as follows.
Immediacy Index (MI) MI measures the size of an indicator within a short period after a
paper is published, which represents the promptness of this indicator. Because the articles
in 2019 in this study have only two years of citations at the statistics time, we computed the
MI for citations by taking the average of the corresponding citations within two years after
the publication year of an article:
∑2
MK
MI c = k=1 (1)
2
Given that papers gain a certain number of views, downloads, reposts, and discussions
as soon as they are published, the metrics of usage, sharing and discussions are more
timely than those of citations. Therefore, we defined the MI for usage, sharing and discus-
sions as the average of the corresponding metric values within three months (including the
month of publication) after a paper is published:
∑2
MK
MI u = k=0 (2)
3
Volatility Index (VI) A greater dispersion of metrics data corresponds to an indicator’s
lower stability and greater volatility. Therefore, we used the coefficient of variation (CV) to
represent the fluctuation degree of metric values. CV is calculated as the ratio of the stand-
ard deviation to the mean. To prevent the formula from being meaningless when the mean
equals 0, we added β to the formula denominator as shown below:
{
s 0, X ≠ 0
VI = 𝛽= (3)
X+𝛽 1, X = 0

where s denotes the standard deviation of the metric value, whereas X̅ denotes the mean
value.
Growing Trend Index (GTI): Trend analysis is a quantitative forecasting method that pre-
dicts growing tendencies by finding regular changes in historical data. We used the slope
formula derived from the principle of least squares to evaluate the growing trend of metrics
at the statistical time nodes within a specific time frame. GTI is computed as follows:
∑T ∑T ∑T
T × k=1 k × Mk − k=1 k × k=1 Mk
GTI = �∑ �2 (4)
T × Tk=1 k2 − T
∑
k=1
k

Given the varying time units among indicators and the immediacy of usage, sharing and
discussions, we set T in formula (4) to 5 months before 2022 for the GTI of usage, sharing

13
Scientometrics (2023) 128:1711–1743 1717

and discussions. Because of the different publication years, we set T of the GTI of citations
for articles published between 2015 and 2017, in 2018 and 2019 to 5, 4, and 3 years before
2022, respectively.
Peak Velocity Index (PVI) PVI indicates the time taken by an indicator to reach its maxi-
mum value and the size of the peak. M ­ max denotes the maximum value of an indicator over
the life cycle of a paper, ­Tmax denotes the time when an indicator peaks, and ­T0 represents
the publication time (measured in years for citations and in months for usage, sharing and
discussions) of the literature. We computed PVI as follows:
Mmax
PVI = ln ( ) (5)
Tmax − T0 + 1

Results analysis

Three types of publication delays of articles

We calculated the acceptance delay, technical delay, and overall delay of articles published
between 2015 to 2019 according to their received time, accepted time, and published time
and analyzed them using a boxplot, as shown in Fig. 1 (the publication delay is calculated
in days). In the boxplot, the upper quartile of the box represents the third quartile, the mid-
dle line inside the box indicates the median, and the lower quartile of the box means the
first quartile. From Fig. 1, the third quartile (Q3) of acceptance delay increases annually
from 2015 to 2018, which indicates that the time from the editor’s receipt of the manuscript
to the acceptance of the article has been dramatically extended. However, we observed a

Fig. 1  The acceptance delay, technical delay and overall delay in each year from 2015 to 2019

13
1718 Scientometrics (2023) 128:1711–1743

decrease in acceptance delay in 2019. Most of the technical delays are less than 50 days
for Q3 each year from 2015 to 2019. The technical delay in 2015 has the highest median
(38 days), whereas the technical delays from 2016 to 2019 have medians of 21 to 22 days,
which indicates that publishers have become more efficient in processing the accepted arti-
cles over time. The median of overall delay decreases from 2015 to 2016, increases from
2016 to 2018, and reaches its highest median (190 days) in 2018. However, the median of
overall delay decreases again to 171.5 days in the following year.
By using the quartile method, we divided all sample literature into 4 groups, RQ1 (the
range from the minimum to the first quartile Q1), RQ2 (the range from Q1 to the second
quartile, i.e. the median, Q2), RQ3 (the range from Q2 to Q3), and RQ4 (the range from
Q3 to the maximum), according to the citations from low to high.
We analyzed the distribution of acceptance delay, technical delay, and overall delay for
these articles with different quantity ranges of citations as shown in Fig. 2. Only articles in
RQ4 of citations have the upper quartile of the acceptance delay of fewer than 200 days,
while the upper quartiles of the acceptance delay for those articles in other citation groups
(RQ1, RQ2, RQ3) are greater than 200 days. The technical delays for all citation groups
do not significantly differ as a whole. However, the technical delay of papers in RQ4 has a
bigger median (27 days), whereas those in other citation groups have medians ranging from
22 to 23 days. In addition, the maximum technical delay of articles in RQ2, RQ3 and RQ4
is less than 400 days, whereas that of articles in RQ1 extends over 600 days. The upper
quartiles of the technical delay for the articles in all groups are less than 50 days, suggest-
ing that most papers can be published within two months after they are accepted. With the
augment of the number of the citations, the upper quartile of the overall delay gradually
decreases, demonstrating that most articles with higher citations have a relatively shorter
publication time lag.

Fig. 2  The acceptance delay, technical delay and overall delay in different quantity ranges of citations by
citation quartiles from 2015 to 2019

13
Scientometrics (2023) 128:1711–1743 1719

The above analysis (Fig. 2) reveals that the more frequently cited articles have a rela-
tively shorter acceptance delay and overall delay than the less frequently cited papers. We
also did not observe any remarkable variance in the technical delay of articles across differ-
ent citation groups.

Differences in the three types of delays across six subject areas

To confirm whether the three types of delays differ across disciplines, we calculated the
maximum, minimum, interquartile range (IQR), mean, and standard deviation (STD) of
acceptance delay, technical delay, and overall delay of the literature in the six subject areas
of Biology and life sciences, Chemistry, Engineering and technology, Economics, Psychol-
ogy, and Sociology from 2015 to 2019 (Table 2).
As shown in Table 2, for the acceptance delay, except for the articles in Engineering and
technology, the most prolonged acceptance delay of articles from the other five disciplines
all exceed 33 months. But the minimum acceptance delay in Biology and life sciences is
zero, suggesting that at least one article in the subject was accepted on the same day upon
submission, which is not found in the other five disciplines. Moreover, the median, IQR,
mean, and STD of acceptance delay for articles in Economics, Psychology, and Sociology
are all bigger than those articles in Biology and life sciences, Chemistry, and Engineer-
ing and technology, which indicates that on the whole, the literature from social sciences

Table 2  The acceptance delay, technical delay and overall delay across six subject areas and their statistical
values (unit in days)
Descriptive statistics Biology and Chemistry Engineering Economics Psychology Sociology
life sciences and technol-
ogy

Max(A) 1218 1148 933 1003 1211 1274

Min(A) 0 5 5 6 3 12
Median(A) 135 126 139 162 149 154.5
IQR(A) 95 89 108 125 108.25 111
Mean(A) 153.79 144.94 166.00 193.68 175.20 179.62
STD(A) 88.67 87.13 103.32 119.84 108.07 106.61
Max(T) 254 358 351 630 295 295
Min(T) 6 6 4 9 4 4
Median(T) 24 22 23 24 24 24
IQR(T) 22 18 18.25 20 19 19
Mean(T) 31.61 28.42 29.74 31.38 29.99 30.16
STD(T) 22.72 20.45 21.53 25.13 20.84 21.10
Max(O) 1234 1189 960 1048 1238 1314
Min(O) 9 28 28 31 37 35
Median(O) 166 154 169 194 181 185
IQR(O) 103 94 112 129 114 117
Mean(O) 185.41 173.36 195.74 225.06 205.18 209.77
STD(O) 92.55 90.80 106.78 123.05 110.11 109.35

Acceptance delay is denoted by (A), technical delay by (T) and overall delay by (O)

13
1720 Scientometrics (2023) 128:1711–1743

usually need to take more time to review before they are accepted, and the discrepancy of
acceptance delay from natural sciences is smaller compared with that from social sciences.
Regarding the technical delay, only articles in Economics have technical delays exceed-
ing 20 months. Further, the minimum technical delay for Engineering and technology,
Psychology, and Sociology are 4 days shorter than that for Biology and life sciences,
Chemistry, and Economics. Overall, the median, IQR, mean, and STD of technical delay
for articles in the six disciplines have no striking differences. This suggests that the differ-
ence of technical delay across various disciplines is not as notable as that of the acceptance
delay, reflecting from the side that the length of the overall delay is mainly determined by
the period between reception and acceptance.
For the overall delay, similar to the acceptance delay, the overall delay maximum of
Engineering and technology is smaller than that of the other five disciplines, whose overall
delays are more than 34 months. Besides, Biology and life sciences is the only one among
the six disciplines with a single-digit minimum overall delay. The median, IQR, mean, and
STD of overall delay of articles in Biology and life sciences, Chemistry, and Engineering
and technology are shorter than those in Economics, Psychology, and Sociology. Among
them, the median and mean value of overall delay of Biology and life sciences, Chemis-
try, Engineering and technology are less than 6 months and 7 months, respectively. Fur-
thermore, the STD of overall delay for natural science articles is smaller than for social
sciences.
In sum, the majority of articles in natural sciences have shorter acceptance and overall
delay than those in social sciences in this study, and the variances of these two kinds of
delays in the natural sciences are minor than that in social sciences. The above (Table 2)
suggests that the nature of disciplines determines the discrepancy in publication time lag.

Correlations between the three types of delays and a series of measurement

indicators

We conducted Spearman correlation analyses to explore the relationship among the accept-
ance delay, technical delay, and overall delay with the measurement indicators of cita-
tions, usage, sharing and discussions, and collections. Table 3 reports the results of cor-
relation coefficients and corresponding confidence intervals. In the following, TC denotes
total counts; C denotes citations; U denotes usage; S denotes sharing and discussions; Co
denotes collections.
In terms of the citation relevant indicators, Table 3 shows that the TC and MI of cita-
tions have a weakly positive correlation with technical delay (r = 0.151 and r = 0.075,
respectively) and a weakly negative correlation with acceptance delay (r = − 0.100, and
r = − 0.077, respectively) and overall delay (r = − 0.066, and r = − 0.058, respectively),
hence suggesting that a shorter time of being accepted or published corresponds to a greater
TC and MI of citations. Moreover, the VI of citations is weakly positively correlated with
acceptance delay (r = 0.084) and overall delay (r = 0.053), whereas it is negatively corre-
lated with technical delay (r = − 0.123), hence indicating that a shorter time of acceptance
or publication corresponds to a lower VI of citations, but an increase in the waiting time
for papers to be published after being accepted will increase the VI of citations to a small
extent. Further, the GTI of citations has a weakly positive correlation with acceptance
delay(r = 0.030) yet a weakly negative correlation with technical delay (r = − 0.056), hence
suggesting that increasing the review time will slightly increase the GTI of citations at
the statistical time node. Nevertheless, a longer period between acceptance and publication

13
 Table 3  The correlation coefficients and confidence intervals (CI) between different delays and the citation, usage, and sharing and discussion relevant indicators
Indicators Acceptance delay CI(A) Technical delay CI(T) Overall delay CI(O)

C(TC) − 0.100** (− 0.113, − 0.088) 0.151** (0.138, 0.164) − 0.066** (− 0.078, − 0.053)
C(MI) − 0.077** (− 0.089, − 0.064) 0.075** (0.062, 0.088) − 0.058** (− 0.070, − 0.045)
Scientometrics (2023) 128:1711–1743

C(VI) 0.084** (0.071, 0.096) − 0.123** (− 0.136, − 0.110) 0.053** (0.040, 0.065)
C(GTI) 0.030** (0.019, 0.042) − 0.056** (− 0.068, − 0.042) 0.013 (0.001, 0.026)
C(PVI) − 0.068** (− 0.080, − 0.055) 0.060** (0.048, 0.073) − 0.054** (− 0.066, − 0.042)
U(TC) − 0.017** (− 0.030, − 0.003) 0.130** (0.118, 0.143) 0.010 (− 0.003, 0.022)
U(MI) − 0.049** (− 0.060, − 0.035) − 0.002 (− 0.014, 0.010) − 0.044** (− 0.056, − 0.032)
U(VI) − 0.077** (− 0.089, − 0.063) − 0.042** (− 0.054, − 0.030) − 0.078** (− 0.091, − 0.066)
U(GTI) 0.024** (0.011, 0.036) 0.041** (0.028, 0.053) 0.033** (0.020, 0.046)
U(PVI) − 0.046** (− 0.059, − 0.032) − 0.043** (− 0.056, − 0.031) − 0.048** (− 0.061, − 0.036)
S(TC) 0.032** (0.019, 0.045) 0.115** (0.102, 0.129) 0.050** (0.038, 0.064)
S(MI) 0.036** (0.023, 0.048) 0.079** (0.066, 0.092) 0.045** (0.033, 0.058)
S(VI) − 0.028** (− 0.040, − 0.015) 0.007 (− 0.005, 0.020) − 0.024** (− 0.037, − 0.011)
S(GTI) − 0.012 (− 0.023, 0.001) − 0.006 (− 0.019, 0.006) − 0.013* (− 0.025, − 0.001)
S(PVI) 0.032** (0.020, 0.046) 0.116** (0.103, 0.129) 0.049** (0.037, 0.062)
Co(TC) 0.042** (0.028, 0.054) 0.130** (0.118, 0.143) 0.066** (0.053, 0.079)

Confidence intervals (CI) for acceptance delay, technical delay and overall delay are denoted by CI(A), CI(T) and CI(O) separately
** indicates p<0.01, meaning that the correlation is statistically significant at significance level α=0.01; * indicates p<0.05, meaning that the correlation is statistically signifi-
cant at significance level α=0.05
1721

13
1722 Scientometrics (2023) 128:1711–1743

will produce a contrary effect. Additionally, the PVI of citations has a weakly negative cor-
relation with acceptance delay (r = − 0.068) and overall delay (r = − 0.054), meaning that a
shorter acceptance or total publication time of the literature contributes to a larger PVI of
citations.
For the usage relevant indicators, the amount of usage is weakly negatively correlated
with acceptance delay (r = − 0.017), thereby indicating that a shorter acceptance time lag
can increase the TC of usage to a small extent. However, the TC of usage has a weakly
positive correlation with technical delay (r = 0.130), and the correlation between over-
all delay and the TC of usage is insignificant. Among the time–series usage indexes, MI
has a weakly negative correlation with acceptance delay (r = − 0.049) and overall delay
(r = − 0.044). Combined with the definition of MI, reducing the time for an article to be
accepted or published can increase its usage within three months after its publication by a
small margin. In addition, all three types of delays have a weakly negative correlation with
the VI and PVI of usage and a weakly positive correlation with its GTI, thereby suggesting
that a shorter time spent on each stage of the literature from its submission to publication
corresponds to a higher VI and PVI of usage, yet a lower GTI of usage at the statistical
time node.
Corresponding to the sharing and discussion relevant indicators, Table 3 shows that the
TC, MI, and PVI of sharing and discussions are weakly positively correlated with the three
types of delays, thereby indicating that a longer time lag during the publication process
will increase the amount of sharing and discussions to a small extent, the number of shar-
ing and discussions within three months after publication, and the speed at which the quan-
tity of sharing and discussions reaches its maximum. This result may be related to the fact
that some manuscripts are open for review after they are received by editors, shortening the
time for them to become available to the public but causing long delays before their offi-
cial publication. Furthermore, reducing the time of acceptance or final publication of the
literature increases the VI of sharing and discussions to a small extent. A weakly negative
correlation is also observed between the GTI of sharing and discussions and overall delay
(r = − 0.013), hence suggesting that reducing the total delay will slightly increase the GTI
of sharing and discussions.
The number of collections reflects the interests of readers in an article and the degree
of its potential utility. Table 3 manifests that the TC of collections has a weakly positive
correlation with the three types of delays, indicating that a long time between the literature
submission and final publication corresponds to a more extensive collections.
An interesting phenomenon is that the confidence intervals of delays ‘acceptance’ and
‘overall’ are overlapped in some indicators of citations, usage, sharing and discussions, and
collections. This demonstrates that acceptance and overall delay are similar in correlation
with some measurement indicators; furthermore, compared with technical delay, accept-
ance delay tends to play a decisive role in the length of overall delay.

Correlations between the measurement indicators of articles in the different

number of metrics by quartiles and the three types of delays

We use the quartile method that has been adopted in the chapter “Three types of publi-
cation delays of articles” to divide the sample into four groups named RQ1, RQ2, RQ3,
and RQ4 according to their number of citations, usage, sharing and discussions, and
collections, respectively, to understand the relationship between each of their meas-
urement indicators and these delays for articles under the different number of metrics.

13
Scientometrics (2023) 128:1711–1743 1723

Table 4  The group ranges and medians by different metric quartiles

Group ranges and medians Citations Usage Sharing and Collections
discussions

RQ1 [0,7] [418,1994] [0,1] [0,18]

Median (RQ1) 5 1528 0 0
RQ2 [7,14] [1994,3058] [1,3] [18,43]
Median (RQ2) 10 2468 2 30
RQ3 [14,28] [3058,5606] [3,11] [43,89]
Median (RQ3) 19 3945 6 60
RQ4 [28,2320] [5607,976680] [11,9406] [89,3341]
Median (RQ4) 63 9813 30 150

Table 4 reports the medians and quantity ranges of metrics for groups by various met-
ric quartiles. As seen in Table 4, among these four metrics, ’Usage’ has an enormous
median and range of values in each group. In comparison, ’Sharing and discussions’ has
the smallest median and range of values among these four metrics, followed by ’Cita-
tions’ and ’Collections’. This manifests that in the social network environment, ‘Usage’
has a quantitative advantage over the other three metrics. Besides, Figs. 3, 4, 5, 6 show
the Spearman correlation coefficients for the three types of delays with various indica-
tors for articles divided by quartiles of citations, usage, sharing and discussions, and
collections, respectively. The solid symbols indicate statistical significance at the 0.01
or 0.05 level, whereas the hollow signs indicate insignificant correlations.
As shown in Fig. 3a, in all groups by citation quartiles except for RQ2, the TC of
citations has a weakly negative correlation with acceptance delay, with the strong-
est negative correlation occurring in RQ1 (r = − 0.087). Meanwhile, Fig. 3b shows a
weakly negative correlation between the TC of citations and technical delay in RQ1 to
RQ3 but a weakly positive correlation between these two in RQ4. Moreover, the TC of
citations is weakly negatively correlated with overall delay in all groups, and the strong-
est correlation coefficients is in RQ1 (r = − 0.088). From the above analysis (Fig. 3), we
can see that: (i) for most articles, shortening the review or total publication time can
increase their citations to a small extent, and this effect is more pronounced for the lit-
erature with only a few citations; (ii) a reduction in technical delay will slightly increase
the number of citations for the less cited articles but will reduce the citations for those
articles with a large number of citations.
Regarding the MI and PVI of citations, as shown in Fig. 3a, the MI and PVI of cita-
tions have a weakly negative correlation with acceptance delay in RQ1. Figure 3b shows
that the MI and PVI of citations are weakly negatively correlated with technical delay
in all groups by citation quartiles. In Fig. 3c, the MI and PVI of citations have a signifi-
cantly weak negative correlation with overall delay only in RQ1. So it is noted that: (i)
for those articles with only a few citations, shortening the review time will help them
receive more citations within two years after their publication and even reach their peak
number of citations within a shorter period to a small extent; (ii) shortening the time
from acceptance to publication can increase the number of citations within two years
after publication and, to a less extent, reduce the time needed to reach the maximum
number of citations; (iii) the decline in the total publication time of papers with few

13
 1724

13
Fig. 3  The correlation coefficients between the citation–relevant indicators and the three types of delays for articles by citation quartiles
Scientometrics (2023) 128:1711–1743
 Scientometrics (2023) 128:1711–1743

Fig. 4  The correlation coefficients between the usage–relevant indicators and the three types of delays for articles by usage quartiles
1725

13
 1726

13
Fig. 5  The correlation coefficients of the sharing and discussion–relevant indicators with the three types of delays for articles by sharing and discussion quartiles
Scientometrics (2023) 128:1711–1743
Scientometrics (2023) 128:1711–1743 1727

Fig. 6  The correlation coef-

ficients between collections and
the three types of delays for
articles by collection quartiles

citations can increase the citation frequencies within two years after publication and
reduce the time needed to reach the peak number of citations to a small extent.
Figure 3a shows that the VI of citations has a significantly and weakly positive cor-
relation with acceptance delay in all groups by citation quartiles except for RQ2, which
indicates that for the majority of the articles, improving the efficiency of the review phase
will slightly reduce the VI of citations. Meanwhile, Fig. 3b shows that the VI of citations
has a weakly positive correlation with technical delay in RQ1, a weakly negative correla-
tion in RQ3 and RQ4, and the strongest correlation in RQ4 (r = − 0.194), which suggests
that for those articles with only a few citations, increasing their technical delay after being
accepted will increase the degree of fluctuations in their number of citations. However, for
those articles with numerous citations, increasing their technical delay will improve the
stability of their citation frequencies in each time window.
From Figs. 3a and c, the GTI of citations in all groups by citation quartiles except for
RQ1 has a weakly positive correlation with acceptance delay and overall delay. While in
Fig. 3b, the correlation between the GTI of citations and technical delay is weakly negative
in every group by citation quartiles, and this negative correlation gradually increases along
with the number of citations. Therefore, an increase in the time of acceptance or final pub-
lication for those articles with a relatively high number of citations will slightly enhance
their GTI in the statistical time spot. But shortening the technical delay helps slightly pro-
mote the GTI of citations regardless of their frequency.
In terms of the usage–relevant indicators, in Fig. 4a, the TC of usage has signifi-
cant weakly negative correlations with acceptance delay (r = − 0.050) and overall
delay(r = − 0.042) in RQ1, which suggests that for those articles with very low usage,
shortening their acceptance time or publication time will increase their usage to a small
extent. Meanwhile, in Fig. 4b, the TC of usage is weakly positively correlated with techni-
cal delay in RQ4 (r = 0.084), meaning that a more extended period between being accepted
and published corresponds to a greater amount of usage for that literature with heavy
usage.
The MI and PVI of usage show similar trends in their correlation with the three types of
delays in all groups by usage quartiles. Among them, the correlations of the MI and PVI

13
1728 Scientometrics (2023) 128:1711–1743

of usage with acceptance delay gradually diminish along with larger usage quartiles but
remain weakly negative. Moreover, from RQ1 to RQ3, the correlations of the MI and PVI
of usage with technical delay and overall delay are gradually attenuated but still show a
weakly negative correlation. Still, the MI and PVI of usage are significantly positively cor-
related with technical delay in RQ4. Consequently, curtailing the technical delay or total
publication time for articles with low usage will increase their MI and PVI of usage, which
is reversed for those articles with massive usage.
Figures 4a and c show that, as a whole, the negative correlation of the VI of usage with
acceptance delay and overall delay weakens as the range values of usage augment. Mean-
while, Fig. 4b demonstrates that the correlation between the VI of usage and technical
delay is significantly negative in RQ1 and RQ2 but significantly positive in RQ4, thereby
suggesting that a reduction in technical delay boosts the fluctuation of usage for articles
with low usage but weakens that for pieces with a multitude of usage. Additionally, the GTI
of usage is weakly positively correlated with acceptance and overall delay in all groups by
usage quartiles except RQ2, indicating that prolonging the period of acceptance or eventual
publication will advance the GTI of usage at the statistical time point for most articles.
For the sharing and discussion–relevant indicators, Fig. 5a shows a weakly negative cor-
relation between the TC of sharing and discussions and acceptance delay in RQ1, RQ2, and
RQ4. And the correlation coefficient gradually decreases along with increasing sharing and
discussions. In Fig. 5b, the TC of sharing and discussions is significantly correlated with
technical delay in all groups except for RQ2, and the correlation between these two is nega-
tive in RQ1 but positive in RQ3 and RQ4. As shown in Fig. 5c, the TC of sharing and dis-
cussions is weakly negatively correlated with overall delay in RQ1 and RQ2, which means
that for those articles with few sharing and discussions, shortening their technical delay or
final publication time will slightly increase their number of sharing and discussions.
In Fig. 5b, the MI of sharing and discussions has a slightly negative correlation with
technical delay from RQ1 to RQ3, meaning that for unpopular papers, shortening the tech-
nical delay can enlarge their immediate sharing and discussions to a small degree. Further,
the VI of sharing and discussions has weakly negative correlations with acceptance delay
and overall delay from RQ1 to RQ3. These correlations gradually decrease along with the
increase in sharing and discussion quartiles. Therefore, shortening the review cycle and
the total publication time lag of the literature will increase the instability of its monthly
volume of sharing and discussions to a small extent, but this effect will diminish as the
number of sharing and discussions increases.
Figures 5a and c reveal that the PVI of sharing and discussions is weakly positively cor-
related with both acceptance delay and overall delay in RQ1. Consequently, for articles that
attract only a few social sharing and discussions, extending their review cycle or total pub-
lication time may improve their quality and thus acquire maximum sharing and discussions
on the web within a shorter period.
An interesting phenomenon can be seen in Fig. 5b that the TC, MI and PVI of sharing
and discussions have a slightly positive correlation with technical delay in RQ4. This can
be understood that for hot–discussed articles, extending the technical delay can improve
their TC, MI, and PVI of sharing and discussions to a small degree, which, probably owing
to the longer time they are stuck during the technical delay, the inherent popularity of them
arise more massive sharing and discussions as soon as being published.
As seen in Fig. 6, the TC of collections have a weakly negative correlation with accept-
ance delay and overall delay in RQ1 and RQ4 but have a weakly positive correlation
with these delay types in RQ2. Therefore, for those articles with very few or vast collec-
tions, reducing their review time or total publication time lag can increase their number

13
Scientometrics (2023) 128:1711–1743 1729

of collections to a small degree. Moreover, reducing technical delay can slightly increase
the collections of articles with a small number of collections yet reduce those with a large
number of collections.

Correlations between the measurement indicators and the three types of delays
in different disciplines

We performed Spearman correlation analyses for each indicator and the three types of
delays across the six subject areas considered in this study, and the results are presented in
Tables 5, 6, 7.
As shown in Table 5, the correlation between each measurement indicator and accept-
ance delay varied according to the nature of the discipline. For instance, for articles in the
social sciences, their TC, MI, and PVI of citations have stronger correlations with accept-
ance delay than those articles in the natural sciences. And the VI of citations is positively
correlated with acceptance delay for all six disciplines. Interestingly, there is a weakly
positive correlation between the GTI of citations and acceptance delay for articles in the
natural sciences, which does not exist in the social sciences. Further, except for Biology
and life sciences, Chemistry, and Psychology, the TC of usage is negatively correlated with
acceptance delay for articles from the left disciplines. The MI, VI, and PVI of usage have
stronger negative correlations with acceptance delay for papers in the social sciences com-
pared with those in the natural sciences. Only for papers in Engineering and technology,
the GTI of usage is positively correlated with acceptance delay, and the VI of sharing and
discussions is negatively correlated with acceptance delay. Moreover, the correlations of
acceptance delay with the TC, MI, and PVI of sharing and discussions are weakly posi-
tive for articles in the natural sciences but negative or irrelevant for articles in the social

Table 5  Spearman correlation coefficients between the measurement indicators and acceptance delay in six
disciplines
Indicators Biology and Chemistry Engineering and Economics Psychology Sociology
life sciences technology

C(TC) − 0.054** − 0.036* − 0.089** − 0.101** − 0.092** − 0.118**

C(MI) − 0.034** 0.007 − 0.057** − 0.069** − 0.058** − 0.108**
C(VI) 0.036* 0.037* 0.083** 0.059** 0.072** 0.086**
C(GTI) 0.049** 0.038* 0.060** 0.029 0.031 0.013
C(PVI) − 0.034* 0.004 − 0.045** − 0.050** − 0.051** − 0.093**
U(TC) 0.017 0 − 0.043** − 0.058** − 0.006 − 0.067**
U(MI) − 0.006 0.012 − 0.035* − 0.093** − 0.039* − 0.106**
U(VI) − 0.022 0.002 − 0.023 − 0.108** − 0.067** − 0.094**
U(GTI) − 0.004 0.012 0.033* 0.014 0.030 − 0.001
U(PVI) − 0.010 0.008 − 0.026 − 0.098** − 0.033* − 0.085**
S(TC) 0.049** 0.038* 0.041** − 0.022 0.013 − 0.076**
S(MI) 0.065** 0.035* 0.035* − 0.033* 0.018 − 0.078**
S(VI) − 0.016 − 0.022 − 0.045** − 0.030 − 0.027 0.017
S(GTI) − 0.017 − 0.014 − 0.002 − 0.005 − 0.029 − 0.001
S(PVI) 0.059** 0.044** 0.032* − 0.020 0.019 − 0.107**
Co(TC) 0.042** 0.037* 0.020 0 0.034* − 0.030

13
1730 Scientometrics (2023) 128:1711–1743

Table 6  Spearman correlation coefficients between the measurement indicators and technical delay in six
disciplines
Indicators Biology and Chemistry Engineering and Economics Psychology Sociology
life sciences technology

C(TC) 0.207** 0.187** 0.148** 0.086** 0.191** 0.130**

C(MI) 0.128** 0.114** 0.058** 0.010 0.108** 0.050**
C(VI) –0.197** –0.134** –0.107** –0.072** –0.148** –0.107**
C(GTI) –0.025 –0.053** –0.072** –0.098** –0.040* –0.056**
C(PVI) 0.092** 0.093** 0.055** 0.006 0.091** 0.037*
U(TC) 0.159** 0.145** 0.123** 0.065** 0.168** 0.101**
U(MI) 0.045** –0.003 –0.025 –0.071** 0.050** –0.017
U(VI) –0.083** –0.049** –0.050** –0.039* –0.018 –0.013
U(GTI) 0.163** 0.021 0.021 –0.001 0.004 0.004
U(PVI) –0.043** –0.037* –0.055** –0.076** 0 –0.044**
S(TC) 0.150** 0.120** 0.103** 0.013 0.141** 0.119**
S(MI) –0.010 0.110** 0.066** 0.040* 0.125** 0.105**
S(VI) 0.042** 0.044** 0.058** 0.024 0.058** –0.194**
S(GTI) –0.019 0.001 –0.018 –0.012 –0.001 0.010
S(PVI) 0.112** 0.105** 0.055** 0.037* 0.097** 0.258**
Co(TC) 0.174** 0.130** 0.128** 0.055** 0.159** 0.089**

Table 7  Spearman correlation coefficients between the measurement indicators and overall delay in six dis-
ciplines
Indicators Biology and Chemistry Engineering and Economics Psychology Sociology
life sciences technology

C(TC) − 0.006 0.010 −0.052** −0.082** −0.052** −0.088**

C(MI) − 0.008 0.036* −0.039* −0.066** −0.035* −0.094**
C(VI) − 0.014 − 0.001 0.054** 0.045** 0.041** 0.061**
C(GTI) 0.028 0.024 0.040* 0.009 0.013 − 0.002
C(PVI) − 0.017 0.027 − 0.030 − 0.047** − 0.033* − 0.083**
U(TC) 0.052** 0.031* − 0.016 − 0.044** 0.027 − 0.048**
U(MI) 0.009 0.014 − 0.035* − 0.099** − 0.027 − 0.104**
U(VI) − 0.039* − 0.006 − 0.027 − 0.109** − 0.064** − 0.086**
U(GTI) 0.045** 0.015 0.033* 0.013 0.031* − 0.004
U(PVI) − 0.018 0.005 − 0.029 − 0.103** − 0.029 − 0.087**
S(TC) 0.078** 0.060** 0.056** − 0.023 0.036* − 0.056**
S(MI) 0.050** 0.053** 0.043** − 0.029 0.038* − 0.062**
S(VI) 0.001 − 0.014 − 0.032* − 0.023 − 0.015 − 0.022
S(GTI) − 0.023 − 0.013 − 0.005 − 0.008 − 0.029 0.001
S(PVI) 0.077** 0.058** 0.039* − 0.020 0.033* − 0.058**
Co(TC) 0.077** 0.065** 0.045** 0.011 0.065** − 0.012

sciences. We also observed a significant positive correlation between acceptance delay and
the TC of collections for articles in Biology and life sciences, Chemistry, and Psychology
but not for other disciplines.

13
Scientometrics (2023) 128:1711–1743 1731

Table 6 shows a significantly weak positive correlation between the TC of citations and
technical delay for articles across the six disciplines. Moreover, technical delay is weakly
positively correlated with the MI and PVI of citations for all subject areas except for Eco-
nomics. Besides, the MI and VI of citations for the literature in Biology and life sciences
have the highest correlation coefficient with the technical delay, indicating that changes in
technical delays have a relatively stronger influence on Biology and life sciences articles.
However, the GTI of citations shows a weakly negative correlation with technical delay for
papers in all disciplines except for Biology and life sciences, where no significant correla-
tion is observed.
For the usage–relevant indicators and technical delay, the TC of usage for articles across
the six subject areas are significantly positively correlated with technical delay. Further,
a shorter technical delay for those articles in the natural sciences and Economics corre-
sponds to greater VI of usage to a small degree. Moreover, reducing the technical delay in
all subject areas other than Psychology can improve the PVI of usage by a small margin.
Apart from Economics, the TC of sharing and discussions positively correlate with
technical delay for the literature in other disciplines. For those articles in all subject areas
except for Biology and life sciences, the MI of sharing and discussions shows a weakly
positive correlation with technical delay. The VI and PVI of sharing and discussions in
almost all disciplines except for Economics are significantly correlated with the technical
delay, with the articles in Sociology demonstrating the strongest correlation. The correla-
tion coefficient of technical delay for articles in Sociology with the VI of sharing and dis-
cussions is − 0.194, while that with the PVI of sharing and discussions is 0.258. This man-
ifests that the increase in the interval from being accepted to published causes the decrease
in the VI of sharing and discussions for articles in Sociology but induces the higher PVI
of sharing and discussions of Sociology papers. In addition, the TC of collections for the
literature in all subject areas show a weakly positive correlation with technical delay.
As seen in Table 7, the TC of citations is weakly negatively correlated with overall
delay for articles in all disciplines other than Biology and life sciences and Chemistry. We
also observe no significant correlation between the MI of citations and overall delay for
articles in Biology and life sciences, a weakly positive correlation between overall delay
and the MI of citations for articles in Chemistry, which is negative between the two for
articles in other disciplines. Moreover, the VI of citations has no significant correlation
with overall delay for articles in Biology and life sciences and Chemistry, but a significant
weakly positive correlation is observed for articles in Engineering and technology and the
social sciences. Furthermore, the GTI of citations has a weakly positive correlation with
overall delay for Engineering and technology articles. And reducing the total publication
time can increase the PVI of citations for articles from the social sciences.
Shortening the overall delay of articles in Biology and life sciences, and Chemistry con-
tributes to reducing the TC of usage. By contrast, the TC of usage negatively correlate with
overall delay for Economics and Sociology articles. Further, reducing the overall delay will
slightly increase the MI of usage for articles in Engineering and technology, Economics,
and Sociology. The VI of usage has no significant correlation with overall delay for articles
in Chemistry and Engineering and technology, but a significant weakly negative correla-
tion is observed for articles in other disciplines. Furthermore, the GTI of usage for papers
in Biology and life sciences, Engineering and technology, and Psychology shows a weakly
positive correlation with overall delay. Additionally, decreasing the overall delay will, to a
small extent, help articles in Economics and Sociology obtain larger PVI of usage.
For Economics articles, all indicators of sharing and discussions, and collections have
no significant correlation with overall delay. However, the TC, MI, and PVI of sharing and

13
1732 Scientometrics (2023) 128:1711–1743

discussions show a weakly positive correlation with overall delay for natural sciences and
Psychology articles and a weakly negative correlation for Sociology articles. In addition,
the VI of sharing and discussions shows a weakly negative relationship with overall delay
for articles in Engineering and technology. Additionally, except for papers in Economics
and Sociology, the TC of collections for articles from the natural sciences and Psychology
are weakly positively correlated with overall delay.

Effect of the length of the three types of delays on the measurement indicators

To explore the effect of the length of the three types of delays on each measurement indica-
tor of articles in the social network environment, we define short and long delays as those
below and above the median of the three types of delays (144 days for acceptance delay,
23 days for technical delay, and 174 days for overall delay), respectively. Considering
that the sample is divided into two sets respectively for comparison according to the three
types of short and long delays, namely, there are two independent groups. Therefore, we
apply the Mann–Whitney U test on the distribution of various indicators for articles with
the three short and long delay types and report the results in Table 8. If the value of p is
less than 0.05, then the result is statistically significant, which means that the correspond-
ing indicators of the two groups with short and long delays have significant differences.
Table 9 presents each measurement indicator’s median value for literature with short and
long delays (calculation results are rounded to two decimal places). In Table 9, the medians
of individual indicators in the two groups with short and long delays are equal. Even so, as
long as their p–values meet the significance requirement, it proves that there is a significant
difference between the indicators of the two groups.

Table 8  The values of Z and p Indicators Z(A) p(A) Z(T) p(T) Z(O) p(O)
in Mann–Whitney U tests on the
distribution of the measurement
C(TC) − 11.419 0.000 −20.231 0.000 − 7.148 0.000
indicators of the three types of
short and long delays C(MI) − 8.293 0.000 − 11.663 0.000 − 6.048 0.000
C(VI) − 9.762 0.000 − 16.742 0.000 − 5.179 0.000
C(GTI) − 3.349 0.001 − 5.462 0.000 − 0.800 0.424
C(PVI) − 7.272 0.000 − 9.502 0.000 − 6.032 0.000
U(TC) − 1.364 0.173 − 20.299 0.000 − 2.154 0.031
U(MI) − 4.056 0.000 − 4.452 0.000 − 3.610 0.000
U(VI) − 7.552 0.000 − 2.695 0.007 − 7.568 0.000
U(GTI) − 3.078 0.002 − 4.895 0.000 − 4.607 0.000
U(PVI) − 3.816 0.000 − 0.798 0.425 − 4.558 0.000
S(TC) − 5.453 0.000 − 19.150 0.000 − 7.685 0.000
S(MI) − 5.623 0.000 − 14.488 0.000 − 6.895 0.000
S(VI) − 2.487 0.013 − 1.565 0.118 − 2.360 0.018
S(GTI) − 0.147 0.883 − 0.752 0.452 − 0.822 0.411
S(PVI) − 4.868 0.000 − 18.802 0.000 − 7.376 0.000
Co(TC) − 6.444 0.000 − 19.387 0.000 − 9.475 0.000

Acceptance delay is denoted by (A), technical delay by (T) and overall

delay by (O)

13
Scientometrics (2023) 128:1711–1743 1733

Table 9  The median value of each measurement indicator for articles with the three types of short and long
delays
Indicators Median Median Median Median Median Median
(asa) (ala) (ast) (alt) (aso) (alo)

C(TC) 15.00 13.00 12.00 15.00 14.00 13.00

C(MI) 3.00 3.00 3.00 3.50 3.00 3.00
C(VI) 0.77 0.81 0.82 0.75 0.77 0.80
C(GTI) 0.70 0.80 0.80 0.70 0.80 0.80
C(PVI) 0.51 0.47 0.47 0.56 0.51 0.51
U(TC) 3058.50 3057.00 2776.00 3433.50 3004.00 3118.00
U(MI) 197.67 189.67 194.00 193.17 198.00 188.33
U(VI) 1.09 1.03 1.08 1.04 1.09 1.02
U(GTI) 0.40 0.60 0.40 0.60 0.30 0.60
U(PVI) 5.73 5.66 5.75 5.63 5.75 5.65
S(TC) 3.00 3.00 3.00 4.00 3.00 4.00
S(MI) 0.67 0.67 0.67 1.00 0.67 0.67
S(VI) 5.23 5.17 5.21 5.17 5.24 5.15
S(GTI) 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00
S(PVI) 0.69 0.69 0.41 0.69 0.69 0.69
Co(TC) 50.00 56.00 47.00 60.00 49.00 57.00

For acceptance delay, as shown in Table 8, the TC of citations in the group with short
acceptance delays is significantly different from that in the group with long acceptance
delays. Besides, we can see significant discrepancies in the MI, VI, GTI, and PVI of cita-
tions between papers with short and long acceptance delays. Moreover, the median values
of the TC and PVI of citations for articles with a short acceptance delay are bigger than for
those with a long acceptance delay (the pseudo–median values of the difference for the TC
and PVI of citations are 2.00 and 0.069, respectively), which indicates that most articles
with a short acceptance delay are cited more frequently and get larger PVI of citations
compared with those having a long acceptance delay. At the same time, both the median
values of VI and GTI of citations are smaller for papers with a short acceptance delay than
those with a long acceptance delay (the pseudo–median values of the difference for VI of
citations and the difference for GTI of citations are − 0.039 and − 0.1 separately), suggest-
ing that the VI and GTI of citations for the majority of articles having a short acceptance
delay are lower compared with those articles having a long acceptance delay.
As can be seen in Table 8, articles having short acceptance delays have no apparent
discrepancy with those having long acceptance delays in the TC of usage (Z(A) = − 1.364,
p(A) = 0.173) and the GTI of sharing and discussions (Z(A) = − 0.147, p(A) = 0.883).
However, Table 3 shows that the acceptance delay of articles is weakly negatively corre-
lated with their TC of usage (r = − 0.017**), which manifests that shortening the accept-
ance delay can increase the TC of usage, yet this augment is not that notable. The group
with short acceptance delays differs significantly from those with long acceptance delays in
terms of the MI, VI, and PVI of usage and sharing and discussions, as well as the GTI of
usage. Meanwhile, the median of the MI, VI, and PVI of usage are greater for articles with
a short acceptance delay than for those with a long acceptance delay (the pseudo–median
values of the difference for the MI, VI, and PVI of usage are 5.00, 0.061, and 0.067,
respectively), indicating that the MI, VI, and PVI of usage are larger for articles with a

13
1734 Scientometrics (2023) 128:1711–1743

short acceptance delay. Furthermore, the median of the GTI of usage is smaller for pieces
with a short acceptance delay compared with those articles having a long acceptance delay
(the pseudo–median of the difference is − 0.20), which means that those articles with a
long acceptance delay have a relatively sizeable GTI.
For technical delay, the TC, MI, VI, GTI, and PVI of citations for articles with short
technical delays differ significantly from those with long technical delays. Moreover, the
median values of the TC, MI, and PVI of citations are smaller for articles with a short
technical delay than for those with a long technical delay (the pseudo–median values
of the difference for the TC, MI, and PVI of citations are − 3.00, − 0.50, and − 0.095,
respectively), which indicate that the TC, MI, and PVI of citations are all greater for arti-
cles with a long technical delay. However, the median of the VI and GTI of citations for
pieces with a short technical delay is greater than for those with a long technical delay
(the pseudo–median of the difference for the VI and GTI of citations are 0.065 and 0.10,
respectively).
In terms of the usage–relevant indicators, the papers with short technical delays dif-
fer significantly from those with long technical delays in terms of the TC, MI, VI, and
GTI of usage. Besides, the median values of the TC and GTI of usage for articles with
a short technical delay are smaller compared with those articles having a long technical
delay (the pseudo–median of the difference for the TC and GTI of usage are − 499 and
− 0.3, respectively), suggesting that those articles with a short technical delay also have
relatively few usage and small GTI of usage. On the contrary, the medians of MI and VI
of usage for articles with a short technical delay are larger than those with a long technical
delay (the pseudo–median of the difference for the VI of usage equals 0.013). Interestingly,
the pseudo–median of the difference for the MI of usage is − 6.33, which is inconsistent
with the comparison result of the median of U(MI). The reason may be that in Table 6,
there is a significant correlation between the MI of usage and technical delay for articles in
only three disciplines, with positive correlations in two disciplines and a negative correla-
tion in one discipline. Even so, this does not affect the fact that the MI of usage of articles
with short technical delays is significantly different from that of articles with long technical
delays. Further, for the sharing and discussions–related indicators, only the TC, MI, and
PVI of sharing and discussions show significantly different for the group with short techni-
cal delays and those with long technical delays. At the same time, the median values of the
TC, MI, and PVI of sharing and discussions are lower for articles with a short technical
delay. Hence, the TC, MI, and PVI of sharing and discussions are relatively larger for arti-
cles with a longer technical delay.
For overall delay, the articles with short overall delays differ significantly from those
with long overall delays in terms of the TC, MI, VI, and PVI of citations. Moreover, the
median of the TC of citations for articles with a short overall delay is larger than for those
with a long overall delay (the pseudo–median of the difference is 1.00), which indicates
that articles with a shorter publication time lag are cited more frequently. By contrast, the
median of the VI of citations for papers with a short overall delay is smaller than for those
with a long overall delay (the pseudo-median of the difference is − 0.022). Besides, for
usage–relevant indicators, the TC, MI, VI, GTI, and PVI of usage for the group with short
overall delays are significantly different from those with long overall delays. Compared
with articles with a long overall delay, the medians of the TC and GTI of usage are smaller
for papers with a short overall delay (the pseudo–median values of the difference for the

13
Scientometrics (2023) 128:1711–1743 1735

TC and GTI of usage are –84 and –0.30, respectively). Furthermore, the medians of the
MI, VI, and PVI of usage are higher for articles with a short overall delay than for those
with a long overall delay (the pseudo-median values of the difference for the MI, VI, and
PVI of usage are 5.00, 0.049, and 0.093, respectively). In sum, compared to papers with a
long overall delay, those with a short overall delay have lower TC and GTI of usage, but
a larger MI, VI, and PVI of usage. Additionally, there are significant differences in the
TC, MI, VI, and PVI of sharing and discussions between the articles with short and long
overall delays. Moreover, the median of the TC of sharing and discussions for papers with
short overall delays is smaller than for those with long overall delays, which is the opposite
regarding the VI of sharing and discussions.
Regarding the TC of collections, the articles with short acceptance delays, short techni-
cal delays, and short overall delays are significantly different from those with long delays.
Furthermore, the median values of the TC of collections for articles with short accept-
ance, technical, and overall delays are relatively smaller than for those with long delays
(the pseudo–median values of the three differences for the three types of delays are − 2.00,
− 11.00, and − 4.00, respectively), which suggests that the amount of collections is higher
for articles with long acceptance, technical, and overall delays compared with those articles
having short delays.
asa denotes articles with a short acceptance delay; ala denotes articles with a long
acceptance delay; ast denotes articles with a short technical delay; alt denotes articles with
a long technical delay; aso denotes articles with a short overall delay; alo denotes articles
with a long overall delay.

Discussions and conclusions

Journal articles go through a series of reviews and layout processes from their initial sub-
mission to final publication, which can ultimately affect the efficiency of knowledge dis-
semination. Exploring the relationship between publication delays and evaluation indica-
tors helps the publisher arrange the publication time of articles properly and contributes
to enhancing the influence of the literature. However, few studies have examined the effect
of publication delay on the evaluation indexes of articles in an internet social context.
To fill this gap, we constructed a range of time–series indexes and explored the role of
review, layout cycle, and total publication time lag on the indicators of citations, usage,
sharing and discussions, and collections to understand the impact of delays during the pub-
lication process on the measurement indicators of periodical articles in the social network
environment.
We use the quartile method to obtain articles from the open access journal platform
PLOS with different citation frequencies in six disciplines from 2015 to 2019. The results
manifest that most papers’ acceptance delay and overall delay demonstrate an increasing
trend from 2015 to 2018 but started to decrease in 2019. Moreover, most articles published
in 2015 had a relatively longer technical delay, whereas the processing efficiency of these
articles from acceptance to publication improved from 2016 to 2019. Our analysis of the
three types of delays across different citation quartiles reveals that the acceptance delay
and overall delay of articles with relatively high citations are shorter than those with low

13
1736 Scientometrics (2023) 128:1711–1743

citations. In addition, the median values of the acceptance delay and overall delay of papers
in Biology and life sciences, Chemistry, and Engineering and technology are lower than
those of articles in Economics, Psychology, and Sociology, which, to some extent, indi-
cates that the nature of disciplines determines the delays during the publication process.
The correlations of the three types of delays with various indicators also varied. For the
relevant indicators of citations, the acceptance delay and overall delay of articles have a
weakly negative correlation with the TC, MI, and PVI of citations, respectively, yet have a
weakly positive correlation with the VI of citations. However, the results for the indicators
of sharing and discussions are the complete opposite. Meanwhile, there are significantly
weak negative correlations between the GTI of citations and acceptance delay, as well as
the GTI of sharing and discussions and overall delay. At the same time, the technical delay
has a weakly positive correlation with the TC, MI, and PVI of citations and sharing and
discussions.
In this study, the significantly weak negative relationship between acceptance delay
and the number of citations is consistent with the findings of previous studies. For exam-
ple, based on academic papers published in Nature, Science and Cell from 2005 to 2009,
Shen et al. (2015) found that articles with a short acceptance delay received more cita-
tions than those with a long acceptance delay. Lin et al. (2016) revealed a weak negative
correlation between the editorial delay and the number of received citations of papers
published in Nature, Science and Physical Review Letters. Furthermore, faster reviewed
Covid-19 research has more Scopus citations across all major Covid–19–related journals;
the correlations between review time and citation frequencies presented by Covid-19 arti-
cles are mostly stronger than those presented by non-Covid-19 articles (Kousha & Thel-
wall, 2022).
There may be certain factors that have influenced the associations of publication
delays with a series of evaluation indexes. For instance, our research dataset is much
larger than previous studies in terms of discipline categories and volume of literature.
Although our sample data are drawn from six disciplines in the natural and social sci-
ences, the correlations calculated by mixing the data from all six subject areas and the
correlations calculated separately for each discipline all show a weak negative cor-
relation between citations and acceptance delay. This weak correlation indicates that
it is generally easier for reviewers to make faster and more credible determinations
for high–quality papers, which may attract more influence and citations later. For the
usage–relevant indicators, acceptance delay has a weakly negative correlation with the
TC, MI, VI, and PVI of usage and a weakly positive correlation with the GTI of usage.
In addition, the three types of delays are weakly positively correlated with the TC of
collections. Different metric quartiles also influence such correlations. Further, the cor-
relations between these delays and various measurement indicators differ across subject
areas. For example, there is a weakly positive correlation between the TC of collections
and overall delay for sample articles from the natural sciences (Biology and life sciences,
Chemistry, and Engineering and technology) and Psychology, which is absent for articles
in other disciplines.
The Mann–Whitney U test results reveal that the lengths of the three types of delays for
the literature are significantly different in many indicators. For instance, from Table 8, the
p–values of the TC of citations, sharing and discussions, and collections and the MI, VI,

13
Scientometrics (2023) 128:1711–1743 1737

GTI, and PVI of citations and usage for the articles with short and long acceptance delays
are less than 0.05, indicating that these indicators for the articles with short acceptance
delays have statistically significant differences from those with long acceptance delays.
Besides, most papers with longer acceptance delays are cited less, obtain more collec-
tions, and have smaller MI of usage and PVI of citations and usage than those with shorter
acceptance delays. All in all, the lengths of the three kinds of delays during the publication
can affect the performance of the literature on some indicators under the context of the
social network.
To a certain extent, our results indicate that a shorter publication time is not necessar-
ily preferred in the modern internet communication environment. In general, reducing the
acceptance and final publication lag can improve the efficiency of knowledge diffusion
through the formal academic citation channel. Nevertheless, an appropriate time interval
at a particular stage of the publishing process can enhance the heat of sharing, discussion,
and collection of articles to some extent, hence boosting the attention received by the lit-
erature on the internet. Meanwhile, the difference in the relationship between publication
delays and traditional citation indexes and social network indicators may be attributed to
the more severe hysteresis of the former compared to the latter.
This study has several limitations. First, although we examined the correlations of the
three types of delays with various measurement indicators of articles in six disciplines,
these correlations may not apply to papers in other subject areas and different journals
that are not involved in this work. Second, the reasons behind the established correla-
tions warrant further investigation. For instance, the three types of delays of articles in
our sample have weakly positive correlations with the number of sharing and discussions,
and collections, respectively, which may be ascribed to the fact that some of these arti-
cles are already open and even subject to public scrutiny since their review stage, thereby
extending the time intervals before the final publication. Moreover, the causality between
the length of delays during publication and the measurement indicators of journal articles
is not clear enough. From the author’s perspective, it may refer to gender, fame, coun-
try, institution, etc. From the point of research achievements, it may involve whether it is
online reviewing by the public or a research hotspot in its field and so on. Therefore, the
explanation of causality is complicated, and more detailed work and in–depth research
are needed to explore the lag effect during publication, such as choosing the papers cited
for more than ten years to guarantee a more extended window period (Li et al., 2019) to
further analyze. Additionally, although publication delays vary by discipline categories
and journal types, exploring delays in the publishing process is of great significance to the
author’s reputation, the reasonable layout for publishers, and the efficiency of knowledge
dispersion.

Appendix

See Fig. 7 and See Tables 10, 11, 12.

13
 1738

13
Fig. 7  The title, received time, accepted time, published time, citations, usage, sharing and discussions, and collections for some sample articles
Scientometrics (2023) 128:1711–1743
 Table 10  The obtained citation frequencies for the years since publication to 2021 for the partial sample
Title 2015 2016 2017 2018 2019 2020 2021

In vitro growth of curcuma longa l. in response to five mineral elements and plant density in fed-batch – 5 – 3 1 – 1
culture systems
Endurance training inhibits insulin clearance and ide expression in swiss mice – 3 1 2 – 3 1
Egg–in–Cube: design and fabrication of a novel artificial eggshell with functionalized surface – 2 3 3 – 2 –
Snooker structure–based pharmacophore model explains differences in agonist and blocker binding to bitter 1 1 3 3 2 – –
Scientometrics (2023) 128:1711–1743

receptor hTAS2R39
A click approach to novel D–ring–substituted 16?-Triazolylestrone derivatives and characterization of their – 2 1 1 2 1 3
antiproliferative properties
Urban and Suburban Differences in Hypertension Trends and Self–Care: Three Population–Based Cross– 1 1 3 – 2 2 1
Sectional Studies from 2005–2011
Binding of Kif23–iso1/CHO1 to 14–3–3 Is Regulated by Sequential Phosphorylations at Two LATS Kinase – 2 1 1 1 3 2
Consensus Sites
Modulation of macrophage activities in proliferation, lysosome, and phagosome by the nonspecific immu- 2 3 – 1 – 3 1
nostimulator, mica
Antinociceptive activity of the ethanolic extract, fractions, and aggregatin D isolated from sinningia aggre- 1 1 2 2 1 1 2
gata tubers
Analysis of the Link between the Redox State and Enzymatic Activity of the HtrA (DegP) Protein from – 1 3 4 2 – –
Escherichia coli
An enhanced adaptive management approach for remediation of legacy mercury in the south river – 4 2 1 – 1 2
Antagonizing Bcl–2 family members sensitizes neuroblastoma and ewing?s sarcoma to an inhibitor of 3 1 3 1 2 – –
glutamine metabolism
Effects of Type I collagen degradation on the durability of three adhesive systems in the early phase of 1 – – 5 – – 3
dentin bonding
The N–Terminal Residues 43 to 60 Form the Interface for Dopamine Mediated ?–Synuclein Dimerisation 1 4 – 1 2 1 1
An Integrative Approach to the Study of Filamentous Oligomeric Assemblies, with Application to RecA 4 2 1 – 2 – 1
1739

13
 Table 11  The partial data of usage of some sample literature from publication to 2021 by month
1740

Title Jan 2015 Feb 2015 Mar 2015 Apr 2015 May 2015 Jun 2015 …… Dec 2021

13
In vitro growth of curcuma longa L. in Response to five mineral elements and plant density – – – 132 60 86 …… 17
in fed–batch culture systems
Endurance Training Inhibits Insulin Clearance and IDE Expression in Swiss Mice – – 41 253 55 40 …… 16
Egg–in–Cube: Design and Fabrication of a Novel Artificial Eggshell with Functionalized – – 519 149 91 144 …… 23
Surface
Snooker structure–based pharmacophore model explains differences in agonist and blocker – – 529 221 59 51 …… 9
binding to bitter receptor hTAS2R39
A click approach to novel D-Ring-Substituted 16?-Triazolylestrone derivatives and character- – 147 77 60 27 22 …… 4
ization of their antiproliferative properties
Urban and suburban differences in hypertension trends and self–care: three population–based – 327 67 67 35 22 …… 35
cross–sectional studies from 2005 to 2011
Binding of Kif23–iso1/CHO1 to 14-3-3 Is Regulated by sequential phosphorylations at Two – 177 112 50 46 31 …… 7
LATS Kinase consensus sites
Modulation of macrophage activities in proliferation, lysosome, and phagosome by the – 335 73 47 30 41 …… 15
nonspecific immunostimulator, mica
Antinociceptive activity of the ethanolic extract, fractions, and aggregatin D isolated from – 114 137 38 24 34 …… 28
sinningia aggregata tubers
Analysis of the link between the redox state and enzymatic activity of the HtrA (DegP) – 276 165 74 37 28 …… 8
protein from escherichia coli
An enhanced adaptive management approach for remediation of legacy mercury in the south – 289 65 36 52 21 …… 10
river
Antagonizing Bcl–2 family members sensitizes neuroblastoma and ewing?s sarcoma to an 124 95 58 57 49 32 …… 14
inhibitor of glutamine metabolism
Effects of type I collagen degradation on the durability of three adhesive systems in the early – 295 65 31 45 36 …… 11
phase of dentin bonding
The N–terminal residues 43 to 60 form the interface for dopamine mediated ?-synuclein – 444 121 81 50 54 …… 12
dimerisation
An integrative approach to the study of filamentous oligomeric assemblies, with application – – 277 81 49 48 …… 15
to RecA
Scientometrics (2023) 128:1711–1743
 Table 12  The partial data of sharing and discussions of some sample literature from publication to 2021 by month
Title Jan 2015 Feb 2015 Mar 2015 Apr 2015 May 2015 Jun 2015 …… Dec 2021

In Vitro growth of curcuma longa l. in response to five mineral elements and plant density in – – – – – – …… –
fed–batch culture systems
Endurance training inhibits insulin clearance and IDE expression in swiss mice – – 1 8 – – …… –
Egg–in–Cube: Design and fabrication of a novel artificial eggshell with functionalized – – – – – – …… –
surface
Snooker structure–based pharmacophore model explains differences in agonist and blocker – – 1 – – – …… –
binding to bitter receptor hTAS2R39
Scientometrics (2023) 128:1711–1743

A click approach to novel D–Ring–Substituted 16?-triazolylestrone derivatives and charac- – – – – – – …… –

terization of their antiproliferative properties
Urban and suburban differences in hypertension trends and self–care: three population–based – – – – – – …… –
cross–sectional studies from 2005–2011
Binding of Kif23–iso1/CHO1 to 14-3-3 is regulated by sequential phosphorylations at two – – – – – – …… –
LATS kinase consensus sites
Modulation of macrophage activities in proliferation, lysosome, and phagosome by the – 1 – – – – …… –
nonspecific immunostimulator, mica
Antinociceptive activity of the ethanolic extract, fractions, and aggregatin D isolated from – – – – – – …… –
sinningia aggregata tubers
Analysis of the link between the redox state and enzymatic activity of the HtrA (DegP) – – – – – – …… –
Protein from Escherichia coli
An enhanced adaptive management approach for remediation of legacy mercury in the south – – – – – – …… –
river
Antagonizing Bcl–2 family members sensitizes neuroblastoma and ewing?s sarcoma to an 2 – – – – – …… –
inhibitor of glutamine metabolism
Effects of Type I collagen degradation on the durability of three adhesive systems in the – – – – – – …… –
early phase of dentin bonding
The N–terminal residues 43 to 60 form the interface for dopamine mediated ?-synuclein – – – – – – …… –
dimerisation
An integrative approach to the study of filamentous oligomeric assemblies, with application – – 7 – – – …… –
to RecA
1741

13
1742 Scientometrics (2023) 128:1711–1743

Acknowledgements The authors would like to acknowledge support from the National Social Science
Foundation of China (Grant No. 21BTQ010).

Author contributions JD was involved in conceptualization, formal analysis, methodology, supervision,

review, the preparation of the initial draft, and the editing of the final draft. DH was involved in data collec-
tion, formal analysis, methodology, software, and the preparation of the initial draft.

Funding National Social Science Foundation of China, 21BTQ010, Jingda Ding

Declarations
Conflict of interest The authors declare that they have no conflict of interest.

References
Amat, C. B. (2008). Editorial and publication delay of papers submitted to 14 selected food research
journals. Influence of Online Posting. Scientometrics, 74(3), 379–389. https://​doi.​org/​10.​1007/​
s11192-​007-​1823-8
Andersen, M. Z., Fonnes, S., & Rosenberg, J. (2021). Time from submission to publication varied widely
for biomedical journals: A systematic review. Current Medical Research and Opinion, 37(6), 985–993.
https://​doi.​org/​10.​1080/​03007​995.​2021.​19056​22
Antelman, K. (2017). Leveraging the growth of open access in library collection decision making. In Pro-
ceeding from ACRL 2017: at the helm: leading transformation.
Björk, B. C., & Solomon, D. (2013). The publishing delay in scholarly peer–reviewed journals. Journal of
Informetrics, 7, 914–923. https://​doi.​org/​10.​1016/j.​joi.​2013.​09.​001
Bornmann, L. (2014). Validity of altmetrics data for measuring societal impact: A study using data from
altmetric and F1000Prime. Journal of Informetrics, 8(4), 935–950. https://​doi.​org/​10.​1016/j.​joi.​2014.​
09.​007
Charen, D. A., Maher, N. A., Zubizarreta, N., Poeran, J., Moucha, C. S., & Shemesh, S. (2020). Correction
to: Evaluation of publication delays in the orthopedic surgery manuscript review process from 2010 to
2015. Scientometrics, 124(2), 1137–1137. https://​doi.​org/​10.​1007/​s11192-​020-​03603-5
Das, A., & Das, P. (2006). Delay between online and offline issue of journals: A critical analysis. Library &
Information Science Research, 28(3), 453–459. https://​doi.​org/​10.​1016/j.​lisr.​2006.​03.​019
Egghe, L., & Rousseau, R. (2000). The influence of publication delays on the observed aging distribution
of scientific literature. Journal of the American Society for Information Science JASIS, 51, 158–165.
Guo, X., Li, X., & Yu, Y. (2021). Publication delay adjusted impact factor: The effect of publication delay
of articles on journal impact factor. Journal of Informetrics, 15(1), 101100. https://​doi.​org/​10.​1016/j.​
joi.​2020.​101100
Haustein, S., Sugimoto, C., & Larivière, V. (2015). Guest editorial: social media in scholarly communica-
tion. Aslib Journal of Information Management. https://​doi.​org/​10.​1108/​AJIM-​03-​2015-​0047
Koler–Povh, T., Južnič, P., & Turk, G. (2014). Impact of open access on citation of scholarly publica-
tions in the field of civil engineering. Scientometrics, 98(2), 1033–1045. https://​doi.​org/​10.​1007/​
s11192-​013-​1101-x
Kousha, K., & Thelwall, M. (2022). Covid–19 refereeing duration and impact in major medical journals.
Quantitative Science Studies, 3(1), 1–17. https://​doi.​org/​10.​1162/​qss_a_​00176
Kristin, A. (2004). Do open–access articles have a greater research impact? College & Research Libraries,
65, 372–382. https://​doi.​org/​10.​5860/​crl.​65.5.​372
Laakso, M., & Björk, B. C. (2013). Delayed open access: An overlooked high–impact category of openly
available scientific literature. Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology,
64(7), 1323–1329. https://​doi.​org/​10.​1002/​asi.​22856
Li, L. Y., Min, C., & Sun, J. J. (2019). On the quantification and distribution of citation peaks. Journal of the
China Society for Scientific and Technical Information, 38(7), 697–708. https://​doi.​org/​10.​3772/j.​issn.​
1000-​0135.​2019.​07.​004
Lin, Z., Hou, S., & Wu, J. (2016). The correlation between editorial delay and the ratio of highly cited
papers in Nature. Science and Physical Review Letters. Scientometrics, 107(3), 1457–1464. https://​doi.​
org/​10.​1007/​s11192-​016-​1936-z

13
Scientometrics (2023) 128:1711–1743 1743

Luwel, M., & Moed, H. F. (1998). Publication delays in the science field and their relationship to the ageing
of scientific literature. Scientometrics, 41(1), 29–40. https://​doi.​org/​10.​1007/​BF024​57964
Piwowar, H., Priem, J., Larivière, V., Alperin, J. P., Matthias, L., Norlander, B., et al. (2018). The state of
OA: a large–scale analysis of the prevalence and impact of Open Access articles. PeerJ, 6, e4375.
https://​doi.​org/​10.​7717/​peerj.​4375
Priem, J., Taraborelli, D., Groth, P., & Neylon, C. (2010). Altmetrics: A manifesto Retrieved Oct 26, 2010.
From http://​altme​trics.​org/​manif​esto
Rainie, L., Funk, C., & Anderson, M. (2015). How scientists engage the public. Pew Research Center.
Rigby, J., Cox, D., & Julian, K. (2018). Journal peer review: A bar or bridge? An analysis of a paper’s
revision history and turnaround time, and the effect on citation. Scientometrics, 114(3), 1087–1105.
https://​doi.​org/​10.​1007/​s11192-​017-​2630-5
Shen, S., Rousseau, R., Wang, D., Zhu, D., Liu, H., & Liu, R. (2015). Editorial delay and its relation to sub-
sequent citations: The journals Nature. Science and Cell Scientometrics, 105(3), 1867–1873. https://​
doi.​org/​10.​1007/​s11192-​015-​1592-8
Shi, D., Rousseau, R., Yang, L., & Li, J. (2017). A journal’s impact factor is influenced by changes in pub-
lication delays of citing journals. Journal of the Association for Information Science and Technology,
68(3), 780–789. https://​doi.​org/​10.​1002/​asi.​23706
Skrzypczak, T., Michałowicz, J., Mamak, M., Jany, A., Skrzypczak, A., Bogusławska, J., et al. (2021).
Publication Times in Ophthalmology Journals: The Story of Accepted Manuscripts. Cureus, 13(9),
e17738. https://​doi.​org/​10.​7759/​cureus.​17738
Sotudeh, H., & Estakhr, Z. (2018). Sustainability of open access citation advantage: The case of Elsevier’s
author–pays hybrid open access journals. Scientometrics, 115(1), 563–576. https://​doi.​org/​10.​1007/​
s11192-​018-​2663-4
Tort, A., Targino Dias Góis, J. H., & Amaral, O. (2012). Rising Publication Delays Inflate Journal Impact
Factors. PLoS ONE, 7, e53374. https://​doi.​org/​10.​1371/​journ​al.​pone.​00533​74
Wang, X., Cui, Y., Li, Q., & Guo, X. (2017). Social media attention increases article visits: An investigation
on article–level referral data of PeerJ. Frontiers in Research Metrics and Analytics, 2, 11. https://​doi.​
org/​10.​3389/​frma.​2017.​00011
Wang, X., Fang, Z., & Guo, X. (2016). Tracking the digital footprints to scholarly articles from social
media. Scientometrics, 109(2), 1365–1376. https://​doi.​org/​10.​1007/​s11192-​016-​2086-z
Wang, X., Liu, C., Mao, W., & Fang, Z. (2015). The open access advantage considering citation, arti-
cle usage and social media attention. Scientometrics, 103(2), 555–564. https://​doi.​org/​10.​1007/​
s11192-​015-​1547-0
Xu, S., An, M., & An, X. (2021). Do scientific publications by editorial board members have shorter pub-
lication delays and then higher influence? Scientometrics, 126(8), 6697–6713. https://​doi.​org/​10.​1007/​
s11192-​021-​04067-x
Yegros, A., & Amat, C. (2009). Editorial delay of food research papers is influenced by authors’ experience
but not by country of origin of the manuscripts. Scientometrics, 81(2), 367–380. https://​doi.​org/​10.​
1007/​s11192-​008-​2164-y
Yu, G., Guo, R., & Li, Y. –J. (2006a). The influence of publication delays on three ISI indicators. Sciento-
metrics, 69(3), 511–527. https://​doi.​org/​10.​1007/​s11192-​006-​0167-0
Yu, G., Guo, R., & Yu, D.-R. (2006b). The influence of the publication delay on journal rankings according
to the impact factor. Scientometrics, 67(2), 201–211. https://​doi.​org/​10.​1007/​s11192-​006-​0094-0
Yu, G., Wang, X.-H., & Yu, D.-R. (2005). The influence of publication delays on impact factors. Sciento-
metrics, 64(2), 235–246. https://​doi.​org/​10.​1007/​s11192-​005-​0249-4

Springer Nature or its licensor (e.g. a society or other partner) holds exclusive rights to this article under
a publishing agreement with the author(s) or other rightsholder(s); author self-archiving of the accepted
manuscript version of this article is solely governed by the terms of such publishing agreement and applicable
law.

13